Curt Doolittle

Theme: Education

  • CURRENT RECOMMENDED BOOKS LIST Every once in a while I put out a short list of m

    CURRENT RECOMMENDED BOOKS LIST

    Every once in a while I put out a short list of my favorite books to recommend. I try to keep it short (The list on my web site is well over a thousand books now.)

    THIS LIST

    Morality = Family Model = Property Rights = Wealth = Fragile.

    INFORMAL INSTITUTIONS

    Alan Macfarlane: The Origins of English Individualism

    Emmanuell Todd: L’invention de l’Europe: (family and ideology)

    James C. Russell: The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity

    Ricardo Duchesne: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

    MORALITY

    Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind (evolutionary morality)

    Matt Ridley: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

    Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (co-authored by Richard Wrangham

    FORMAL INSTITUTIONS

    Fukuyama: The Origins Of Political Order

    Acemoglu: Why Nations Fail

    Colin Renfrew: The Collapse of Complex Societies

    Hans Hoppe: (post-bureaucracy for homogenous groups)

    POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES

    Political Ideologies: An Introduction (introduction to ideology)

    Stephen Hicks: Explaining Postmodernism

    Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-13 11:19:00 UTC

  • LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2250585A LAW DEGREE STILL PAYS – EVEN IF IT ISN”T WHAT IT WAS, ITS STILL WORTH IT

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-04 05:29:00 UTC

  • HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE? I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was a

    HOW MANY GREAT BOOKS ARE THERE?

    I think Adler’s list was too short, and it was an apologia for democracy. The aristocratic list I’ve been keeping is somewhere around 200, but it has a broader range of interest and it requires more books to alter the direction of the enlightenment than to confirm it with selected confirmation biases.

    But lets say that the list requires 250 books, just to pick a number. And lets say that every 15 points of IQ requires a DIFFERENT book in order to communicate the basic principles to each audience. You’d need say, 5 books total, or perhaps 6 including the original idea. So, that’s a library of 1500 books.

    Now, I’m talking non-fiction here. And you can add fiction to that list, and I have, and I was surprised how few survived scrutiny.

    Any given person would need to read 250 books targeted to his or her reading level, and then the great literature in order to ‘taste’ every time period. (without the narrative it is very difficult to grasp the past in any meaningful way.)

    Even if you only read one book a month that would only take twenty years. If you read two books a month, that would take you only ten years. If we taught reading, writing, math and basic physics through age seven, and then the great books, I’m not really sure there is a lot of wiggle room in education.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-02 03:30:00 UTC

  • Can I Get A Good Paying Job If I Studied International Relations?

    There are only two ‘good’ career paths in the present economy: Medicine and Programming.

    Medicine requires intelligence, reading comprehension, discipline, stamina, and exceptional memory skills. (It is not really mathematically rigorous. And is the last high paying occupation that we can say that of.)

    Programming (at least most of it) requires fairly good reasoning and concentration skills. Pay is immediate but tops out before you exit your twenties and you ‘age’ quickly in the discipline.

    Both fields present good opportunities for college graduates.

    If you want a good paying job with international scope then study quantitative macro economics. Unfortunately, economics requires the most mathematical skill and is one of the most challenging disciplines outside of physics or math – even if it tends to pay better.  If you can’t manage economics then it’s useful to study international finance.

    If you can’t manage finance then marketing research analyst requires basic statistical skills and is an interesting job.

    A legal degree used to be  passport but the market is oversaturated and it is becoming an ordinary job.

    Unlike finance, accounting is too tedious for someone with social and international interests, and is the modern entry level discipline for administrative labor.

    “International Relations” is a code word for ‘Administrative support’ or ‘I will sell telephones soon’. 

    The world has become extremely hostile to administrative and communications positions that have no quantitative and or statistical components to them.

    If you are a female who speaks multiple languages and wants to find a mate outside of her family and social circle it is an expensive but useful way to find one. Otherwise no, it is only a meaningful set of culture studies to prepare one for work in finance, law, tax, shipping, or marketing and without  statistical capability in one of those fields it will not be a ‘good’ job unless you’re counting on ‘luck’ to save you. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/Can-I-get-a-good-paying-job-if-I-studied-International-Relations

  • Can I Get A Good Paying Job If I Studied International Relations?

    There are only two ‘good’ career paths in the present economy: Medicine and Programming.

    Medicine requires intelligence, reading comprehension, discipline, stamina, and exceptional memory skills. (It is not really mathematically rigorous. And is the last high paying occupation that we can say that of.)

    Programming (at least most of it) requires fairly good reasoning and concentration skills. Pay is immediate but tops out before you exit your twenties and you ‘age’ quickly in the discipline.

    Both fields present good opportunities for college graduates.

    If you want a good paying job with international scope then study quantitative macro economics. Unfortunately, economics requires the most mathematical skill and is one of the most challenging disciplines outside of physics or math – even if it tends to pay better.  If you can’t manage economics then it’s useful to study international finance.

    If you can’t manage finance then marketing research analyst requires basic statistical skills and is an interesting job.

    A legal degree used to be  passport but the market is oversaturated and it is becoming an ordinary job.

    Unlike finance, accounting is too tedious for someone with social and international interests, and is the modern entry level discipline for administrative labor.

    “International Relations” is a code word for ‘Administrative support’ or ‘I will sell telephones soon’. 

    The world has become extremely hostile to administrative and communications positions that have no quantitative and or statistical components to them.

    If you are a female who speaks multiple languages and wants to find a mate outside of her family and social circle it is an expensive but useful way to find one. Otherwise no, it is only a meaningful set of culture studies to prepare one for work in finance, law, tax, shipping, or marketing and without  statistical capability in one of those fields it will not be a ‘good’ job unless you’re counting on ‘luck’ to save you. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/Can-I-get-a-good-paying-job-if-I-studied-International-Relations

  • CHINESE NATURAL EUGENICS – AND THE BRITISH PARALLEL “…although just 1 percent

    CHINESE NATURAL EUGENICS – AND THE BRITISH PARALLEL

    “…although just 1 percent of American high-school graduates each year have ethnic Chinese origins, surname analysis indicates that they currently include nearly 15 percent of the highest-achieving students, a performance ratio more than four times better than that of American Jews, the top-scoring white ancestry group.”

    “…the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote: … Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.”

    LIKE WE USED TO BE

    Manorialism was little different from the Chinese experience. But within 150 years we have redistributed our median IQ from being equal to that of the Ashkenazim to the mean.

    The puritan ethic was the natural product of needing to demonstrate fitness in order to gain access to land. And access to land meant access to reproduction.

    We not only have no criteria for reproduction now. We have inverted it so that the lower the criteria the more we can reproduce. And worse, that we have eliminated the criteria for voting.

    QUOTES

    “During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people. But with the turn of the new millennium, such analyses have once again begun appearing in respectable intellectual quarters.

    “The most notable example of this would surely be A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark’s fascinating 2007 analysis of the deep origins of Britain’s industrial revolution, which was widely reviewed and praised throughout elite circles, with New York Times economics columnist Tyler Cowen hailing it as possibly “the next blockbuster in economics” and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong characterizing it as “brilliant.”

    “Although Clark’s work focused on many different factors, the one that attracted the greatest attention was his demographic analysis of British history based upon a close examination of individual testaments. Clark discovered evidence that for centuries the wealthier British had left significantly more surviving children than their poorer compatriots, thus leading their descendents to constitute an ever larger share of each generation. Presumably, this was because they could afford to marry at a younger age, and their superior nutritional and living arrangements reduced mortality rates for themselves and their families. Indeed, the near-Malthusian poverty of much ordinary English life during this era meant that the impoverished lower classes often failed even to reproduce themselves over time, gradually being replaced by the downwardly mobile children of their financial betters. Since personal economic achievement was probably in part due to traits such as diligence, prudence, and productivity, Clark argued that these characteristics steadily became more widespread in the British population, laying the human basis for later national economic success.”

    (FROM: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248/)

    YOU GET WHAT YOU ASK FOR

    You just get all the consequences along with it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 12:01:00 UTC

  • REMEDIAL ENGLISH IN COLLEGE “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and G

    REMEDIAL ENGLISH IN COLLEGE

    “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.” – Joe Sobran

    DATA

    % of population with 4 year degree :

    in 1910: 2.7%

    in 2010: 31%

    Every 15 points is one standard deviation in IQ.

    You need 115 points to COMPREHEND college material.

    That means 15% of the population can actually obtain an education, and that all other eduction is remedial, dumbed down to the non empirical, or wasted, and not in fact college education level material.

    If we educate 50% of the population with some level of college, that means that we are wasting education on 35% of the population who should, as in the GERMAN MODEL GET APPRENTICESHIPS where they can learn by observation and imitation rather than abstraction and inference. Even at this, it appears, that all universities do is sort us by IQ, and improve departmental selection of slave labor for graduate programs – and we learn very little there.

    IQ IS NOT ENVIRONMENTAL, ITS GENETIC, AND IT’S MEANINGFUL IN LIFE. Aside from impulsivity and physical symmetry is the most important genetic attribute, and all that you can teach your kids is good manners, and how to not do anything terribly stupid.

    QUOTE

    “There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college — enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104” – Murray

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-25 07:01:00 UTC

  • YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂 (FB

    YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂

    (FB is such an awesome substitute for a classroom.) 🙂

    I’m trying to finish my work on reforming Austrianism in the context of libertarianism. And I have only one problem left, and that is this damned point of demarcation between the scientific and real, and the logical and platonic. (And I don’t find it interesting really. I actually find it ridiculous. )

    But I’m close enough that I need only follow bibliographies and read a bit in order to understand the current state of the argument. And as such undermine the attack on skepticism as psychological and moral rather than a description about the universe.

    Mathematical and logical platonism being a substitute for scriptural wonder isn’t actually good for anyone. Because it certainly looks like Hayek was right: The twentieth century was an era of mysticism. He said it was created by Marx and Freud. But at this point I’m going to have to throw in Cantor and Chomsky. With the opposition provided by Nietzsche, and Hayek and any number of finitists. And the absurdity is that this certainly looks like a conflict between the Jewish cultural predisposition for magianism and opposition to land holding norms, and the germanic cultural predisposition for mechanism and the necessity of land holding norms.

    I hate it when these big ideas turn out to be complex silly fantasies that we and our cultures bring with us. The world is quite simple. Even the physics of the universe appears quite simple when we understand it. The complex mystical nonsense, as always, involves some sort of magical anthropomorphization or deification of simple processes, whether they be Religion, Philosophy, Logic or Mathematics. The reality is that the world is not very complicate. We make it complicated. If you go SEARCHING for a way to make numbers and sets infinite you will find it, because any ratio is an infinite expression. But measurements are REAL and finite even if RATIOS can be infinite. Sets are a simplistic function once you separate them from the universe of human knowledge. Of COURSE you can create infinite sets that way. But in human REASON using LANGUAGE that’s not possible. Look at the tricks Godel had to come up with – a variation on Cantor, to make his mystical game come true. But he went LOOKING for it in a platonic universe. Science looks for phenomenon using measurements in the real universe.

    Why we desire the world to seem mystically complex, I think, is so that we can, like every mystic in history, use that pretense to take control over others – power from the presumption of knowledge to invalidate normative statements, even if one cannot provide a replacement answer to it. If instead, we admitted that the world was indeed as simple as it is, then most people who are public intellectuals would have very little to do.

    The world is very simple really. The problem isn’t in collecting the 1500 or so ideas that constitute the entire human conceptual vocabulary. It’s in distinguishing them from the extraordinary number of permutations of error.

    Mysticism is mysticism. Nothing real is infinite. Zero is a symbol that exists when we want to represent the idea of nothing countable. The infinity symbol is a shorthand for ‘I have no idea’: when we want to represent more than is countable. That’s it.

    Platonism is silly.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-24 07:24:00 UTC

  • The Rate Of Technological Change Determines The Value Of Different Models Of The State

    [T]he totalitarian system, whether it’s the military or the communist system, is very useful for doing very simple things: fighting wars, imposing education, imposing some system of property rights, and building infrastructure. These are processes of execution, not of invention, research and development in consumer goods. But the totalitarian system cannot improve affairs when there is no understanding of what it must to to approve affairs. The totalitarian system cannot administrate what it does not understand, and it can only understand what is simple and preexisting. The individualist system is superior for invention. It improves affairs. It is scientific not ideological, because science is simply trial and error. For this reason the individualist model is superior when you do not know what to do, because the resource which we call technological knowledge, has been exploited into applications that are beyond the grasp of any group of individuals. If your civilization ‘falls behind’ or becomes ‘calcified by bureaucracy’ then totalitarianism (or revolution) are useful tools for fixing it. But individualism will always out-innovate totalitarianism because it places no prior (input based) constraint on the individual actors in the population. We tend to think in terms of a mixed economy in which the state should focus on execution while the private sector focuses on invention. But our government is not constructed to facilitate this behavior. Its incentives are as Hoppe has shown, to consume cultural, civic, and resource capital as fast as possible in order to maintain power. This doesn’t mean it’s not POSSIBLE to create a mixed government. It’s just not possible to do so under representative democratic republicanism in a heterogeneous polity where each generation possesses the illusion of their own genius, instead of possessing the wisdom that they are members of a cycle reacting to a chain of prior cycles, and that their preferences, beliefs and attitudes, are predictable. It’s the technology that isn’t predictable.

  • The Rate Of Technological Change Determines The Value Of Different Models Of The State

    [T]he totalitarian system, whether it’s the military or the communist system, is very useful for doing very simple things: fighting wars, imposing education, imposing some system of property rights, and building infrastructure. These are processes of execution, not of invention, research and development in consumer goods. But the totalitarian system cannot improve affairs when there is no understanding of what it must to to approve affairs. The totalitarian system cannot administrate what it does not understand, and it can only understand what is simple and preexisting. The individualist system is superior for invention. It improves affairs. It is scientific not ideological, because science is simply trial and error. For this reason the individualist model is superior when you do not know what to do, because the resource which we call technological knowledge, has been exploited into applications that are beyond the grasp of any group of individuals. If your civilization ‘falls behind’ or becomes ‘calcified by bureaucracy’ then totalitarianism (or revolution) are useful tools for fixing it. But individualism will always out-innovate totalitarianism because it places no prior (input based) constraint on the individual actors in the population. We tend to think in terms of a mixed economy in which the state should focus on execution while the private sector focuses on invention. But our government is not constructed to facilitate this behavior. Its incentives are as Hoppe has shown, to consume cultural, civic, and resource capital as fast as possible in order to maintain power. This doesn’t mean it’s not POSSIBLE to create a mixed government. It’s just not possible to do so under representative democratic republicanism in a heterogeneous polity where each generation possesses the illusion of their own genius, instead of possessing the wisdom that they are members of a cycle reacting to a chain of prior cycles, and that their preferences, beliefs and attitudes, are predictable. It’s the technology that isn’t predictable.